Tag Archives: Software

In today’s uncertain market, businesses focus on the agility to become more proactive and reactive towards market changes, new and innovative competitors, and demanding customer preferences. Due to these very challenging business conditions, software development is turning towards agile and Scrum methods for its survival and growth. However, IT operational processes are still unable to deliver similar results.

DevOps is a platformthat emphasizes refining collaboration amongst the operations and development departments of an organization. DevOps uses several technologies to safeguard a dynamic set-up from a life cycle viewpoint. It is a response to sustain business agility when it comes to IT operations. With a focused ideology, organizations can enable continuous software delivery and join software management and creation together by removing silos. DevOps controls the end-to-end software development lifecycle (SDLC) and focuses on the delivery of software-driven innovation.

It aims to speed up time to market for new applications and helps enhance existing applications. Furthermore, it also serves three essential functions for businesses:

It promotes communication and collaboration between developers, IT operational experts, and QA personnel.

It automates software delivery and structural variations.

It helps create an agile platform that is faster, smoother, and streamlined.

If we look back into the history of DevOps, we see that it surfaced as a response to Agile software expansion approaches. It was more of a late reply to cloud computing. On the other hand, if we investigate the progress of cloud CRM, we see that it has facilitated change and innovation over time. Cloud CRM has reduced rigid methodological constructs and fuelledinnovation. An excellent example of this is the concept of a Scrum, which improves the performance frequency of incremental software releases.

In recent years, CRM software deliveries have increased. This has resulted in a direct impact on the release management process. The operational lifecycle is suffering from a bottleneck as it is not compatible with the increased load of deliveries.

For coders, DevOps is pretty much what QA and IT is to the company itself. Perhaps, it is safe to conclude that DevOps and Agile have a synergetic relationship. To explore this relationship, we will investigate the many similarities that Agile and DevOps share:

Both agile and DevOps fuel teamwork amongst versatile and independent teams. The roles may differ, but the key ideology is the same.

Both agile and DevOps promote reiterative and adaptive application approaches and focus on transparency, review, and adaptation. This allows these methodologies to be quality-focused, risk cautious outcomes-oriented.

Agile endorses the continual delivery of progressive software releases. DevOps follows a similar approach when it comes to software operations.

With time, agile methods have created downstream challenges for companies. DevOps offers a solution to these very challenges by streamlining the software creation procedure and allowing for a much faster time to market rate than ever before. DevOps will enable customers to enjoy new software capabilities without process delays. Happy customers are the primary goal of every organization, so that is a big plus!

However, if an organization fails to implement a holistic software ops process to manage agile’s augmented pace, it will suffer much. Problems like a stubborn release method increased errors, and delayed software distribution will occur if an organization is unable to implement software ops properly.

To implement the principals of DevOps in an organization, one needs to follow a systematic approach. Unlike Agile, which has many mature frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, XP, etc., DevOps does not have a similar design for implementation. Experts have even gone far enough to claim that DevOps can be looked at asacohesive extension of the agile framework.

The most popular agile methodology of all time has been the Scrum. It has four basic components: roles, events, artifacts, and rules. There are a few simple procedures that allow these components to be naturally extended into the DevOps ideology. We will go over them one by one.

Roles:

The Scrum has three roles that are divided amongst the scrum team: The Product Owner, the ScrumMaster, and the Development Team. DevOps roles can be handled similarly. The team will include QA experts, IT experts, and developers. In most cases, there will be an overlap in the responsibilities assigned to the roles. An essential goal of DevOps is to eliminate the siloes and create integrated software management and developing personnel. Like the Scrum method, the DevOps team should also be independent and goal-oriented. This means that they will have to work with people from different departments to achieve a common end result.

Events/Ceremonies:

Scrum events or ceremonies are based on sprints. A sprint entails four different scrum ceremonies: sprint planning, daily Scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. The same event-based approach can be incorporated into DevOps to reap Scrum benefits such as higher productivity due to improved collaboration and communication, better-quality products, improved team dynamics, and reduced time to market.

Artifacts:

There are three primary artifacts in the Scrumpractices: TheProduct Backlog, the Sprint Backlog, and the Product Increment. These can be implemented in DevOps, for example, through studying the sprint backlog to plan upcoming releases or to evaluate increments to classify variations to the current software ops.

Tools:

Unlike Agile tools, which are generally limited to apps like Jira and Rally, DevOps tools contain a more evolved toolbox known as the toolchain. The toolchain supports numerous operational requirements making it far more sophisticated than the Agile tools.

There are many ways of incorporating toolchains into grouped categories of release, configuration, and operations management. However, for companies that want to implement a toolchain hierarchy in line with ERP systems such as NetSuite or CRM software applications such as Dynamics 365, the following tools maybe more beneficial:

Code Toolsaid in software development and integrationand oftenassist in thetransitiontowards DevOps.They consist of both integrated development environments and tools specific to applications such as xRM for Dynamics CRM.

Build Toolsare used to migrate solution builds between staged environments, for example, migrating Dev to QA. Build tools deal with the source code, code merging, version control, and automated builds. CRM software publishers often advance their own build tools. A good example of this is Lifecycle Services by Microsoft that helps with build management Dynamics 365.

Test Toolsare used to determine quality, test security, evaluate performance and scalability of the software.

Release Toolsallow continuous integrationand deployment of the software. They are utilized for release approvals and automation. They also come in handy in change management scenarios.

On a conclusive note, I would like to add that DevOps integration is highly beneficial and quite necessary for CRM software innovation. A solution provider that can amalgamate DevOps into solutions that it offers, be it CRM or any other practice, will allow enterprises to have a competitive edge through efficient and streamlined internal operations.

As the world economy is reeling from the rapid spread of COVID-19 and the drastic measures taken to curb it, many businesses are reconsidering their priorities. Long gone seem the days when one of the most pressing issues a company faced was updating its technological stack and deciding whether it should adopt a cloud solution.

Although these considerations might have temporarily moved to the background, I believe the coronavirus crisis will reinforce the case for moving to the cloud for the following three reasons. I will explain my points with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, as this is the cloud solution I know best.

1. Remote work will become much more widespread

The trend towards working remotely gained traction long before the coronavirus pandemic, carried by a number of wider societal trends. “Telecommuting” helps connect teams in a globalized world. It can help save time and costs for business travel. It can improve employees’ work-life balance, thus contributing to the integration of a more diverse population into the workforce. Additionally, it can help reduce carbon emissions and caters to the preferences of millennials who favor (or idealize) working from a beach bed or a mountain hut rather than an office.

The drastic social distancing measures put in place in response to the pandemic are forcing businesses to conduct an experiment on remote work, and many of them will discover the above benefits (at least partially). Many of them will also discover the limitations of their current technological setup: Can employees access their systems from outside the company’s premises? Can they do so from mobile devices?

Using cloud-based software, they can. SAP S/4HANA Cloud, for example, can be accessed from a web browser, no matter where you are at that moment. You can use any device, be it a smartphone, a tablet, or a laptop. Some will argue that they could achieve similar results with an on-premises architecture and a VPN. But as my colleague and host of the SAP Experts Podcast Alex Greb pointed out recently, “Even DAX heavyweight companies have recognized that it’s not that easy having their people work from home, as their VPN bandwidths have started to hit their boundaries.”

This problem would not occur working with a cloud solution, and on top of that, it would be much easier to maintain from an IT perspective. There is a good chance that many companies will come out of this big social distancing experiment having learned that cloud software made working from home much easier – and thus, made their companies more resilient.

2. There will be renewed focus on operational efficiency

With entire economic sectors in a virtual standstill, a grave economic recession seems all but inevitable. The IMF, for example, assumes that the economic upheaval we are about to face will dwarf the supposedly once-in-a-generation meltdown of 2008. Regardless of whether these fears are overblown or understated, there is little doubt that the longest economic recovery in history may have come to an abrupt end. And as revenue sources dry up in this process, a reinforced focus on reducing operational costs will follow as companies scramble to safeguard their bottom lines.

Cloud software can help cut operational costs. Implementing best-practice processes built into cloud software provides the opportunity to harvest some low-hanging fruit: giving processes a makeover that might have gone unchecked for a long while. SAP is constantly innovating on these best practices, with the goal of reducing 50% of repetitive processes in the coming years. To that end, for example, “intelligent technologies” (machine learning, conversational AI, robotic process automation) are increasingly phased into SAP S/4HANA Cloud, automating more and more repetitive processes. This way, companies can not only profit from a short-term boost in productivity after implementation but continue to improve their bottom lines as they consume new innovations automatically delivered to them.

3. Companies will increasingly favor OPEX over CAPEX

For organizations that are looking into upgrading their IT landscape, this discussion will sound familiar: Do you favor CAPEX or OPEX? An on-premises installation usually tilts your spending towards capital expenditure (CAPEX): Licenses that need to be bought upfront and heavy implementation projects require a considerable amount of liquidity in the early stage of the software lifecycle. Cloud software, by contrast, allows you to spread those expenditures over a longer time period. Subscription payments hit your cash position in regular intervals, while implementation projects are a lot leaner and faster (although consulting might be needed more often to take advantage of the dynamic innovation cycles described above).

Theoretically, the longer you spread out the payments of an investment over time (as you do when you convert CAPEX to OPEX), the more this increases its net present value (= profitability). In practice, finance departments often had less clear-cut opinions about this matter. What the pandemic – and more so, the looming recession – will change about this discussion is that cash will be in short supply in many sectors of the economy for the foreseeable future.

As a response, affected IT departments will ponder deferring investments until the economic situation lightens up. This could be a lengthy process, however, and businesses with an outdated technological setup will find themselves ill-prepared to take advantage of the subsequent recovery. If your organization is currently evaluating upgrading its IT landscape, you should consider cloud as an option to reconcile your organization’s long-term strategic priorities with its mid-term financial necessities.

Those who innovate throughout the recession will win the recovery

It seems certain that we are in for a bumpy ride for quite a stretch. But as economic history suggests, every downturn – as tough as it may play out – is eventually followed by a recovery. The trickier question is, who will be best prepared to not only weather the storm but also to take advantage of the ensuing economic growth?

It stands to reason that technology will remain a crucial driver of competitiveness even in this new economic era. Hence, it would be unwise to stop innovating, to stop adopting new technology at this point. It might be true that, due to the pandemic, the focus will shift more from opening new revenue sources to improving operational efficiency, from open-sky innovation to best practice, from upfront investment to pay-as-you-go, from the open plan office to the home office. But all these factors will strengthen the case for the cloud.

How can you achieve your business goals with SAP S/4HANA? Find out more about the next generation of SAP business scenario recommendations for SAP S/4HANA in our upcoming webinar session on April 27, 2020. Sign up today.

We are glad to share this news with our community friends that we have recently acquired three value added apps from Rockton Software that will assist in the billing and tax calculation for Dynamics 365. As you know, accounting within Dynamics 365 CRM is something that organizations have been craving for since long and thus with the acquisition of these apps automating recurring billing and subscription in Dynamics 365 CRM will be made possible and thus enabling our Partners to improve productivity and offer end-to-end solutions for their clients.

The motto behind acquisition of these apps was to provide complete accounting and billing solutions to sales and service industries under the header of our organization. We were already offering accounting services to the industries with QuickBooks integration, however, these three apps can also perform standalone using custom entities to record transactions. The apps acquired by us are – Software Management, Tax Processing and Recurring Billing.Let’s delve deep and understand how these apps function to improve Dynamics 365 productivity:

It was developed keeping specifically VARs in consideration. This apps manages software billing and license management and also works for any organization that tracks monthly billing. It also offers flexible billing schedules, payment reminders and penalty calculation. Apart from this, it also helps in automated invoice generation at the click of a button. Also, it helps in sending invoices to entire Accounts Payable team or a single contact.

As Dynamics 365 users always crave for a feature to calculate tax within CRM, Tax Processing has been developed to calculate taxes right within CRM. This automation of tax calculation enables calculating taxes whenever a new quote/order/invoice is created. Taxes with Tax Processing can either be manually or with AvaTax from Avalara. This eliminates the manual calculation of tax and ensures accuracy while calculating taxes.

With Recurring Billing Manager the process of billing can be automated with support for creating billing on daily, monthly and annual billing plans. Invoices are automatically calculated for billing plans and overdue for invoices are created along with penalty for unpaid invoices. With flexible and automatic billing schedules, the task of billing is streamlined and made easy for the users.Thus you have seen how with the help of these apps we will be able to incorporate accounting and billing in our CRM. With these apps the users can act more freely without the stress of calculating taxes manually, scheduling bills at intervals or generating invoices/penalty.So it’s now time to get going quickly. Download the apps for a free trial of 15 days from the links mentioned above or email us at crm@inogic.com for a quick demo.

Worried About the COVID-19 Economy? Here Are 3 Reasons to Get Started with Your CRM Software Project Now

With skyrocketing unemployment, $ 2 trillion (and counting) added to the national debt, and analysts predicting a global recession, businesses are understandably hesitant to take on new projects. But believe it or not, the current economic conditions are actually the ideal time to move forward with your organization’s CRM software project. Here are 3 reasons why from the experts at AKA.

1. Bull Markets and CRM Software Projects Don’t Always Mix

There’s no question that companies have had easy access to capital over the past decade — and in some ways, that’s made it easy to launch new CRM software projects. But a booming economy doesn’t necessarily lend itself to revamping your CRM software.

At AKA Enterprise Solutions, we focus on meeting our customers’ implementation needs. This often means sticking to urgent timelines, which are common in a booming economy. Companies often take on too many projects because of the amount of capital on hand, and then try to rush the projects along at the last minute by sinking more resources into them. But this can result in a lack of testing, which often leads to problems down the road.

A booming economy also means higher turnover of your company’s best talent, as competitors are able to extend attractive job offers. This organizational “brain drain” can lead to a lack of accountability for large CRM projects.

The bottom line: When your business isn’t running at 100% capacity to meet surging customer demand, you have more time to devote to a new CRM software project. This means better results and fewer errors.

2. Customer Relationship Management is Key for Thriving in a Shrinking Economy

During the last recession, AKA helped a number of businesses transform the way they processed their customer data by implementing new and up to date CRM software solutions. As a result, these businesses were able to better serve their loyal customers and take advantage of existing customer data — both of which helped them stay afloat in a shrinking economy.

Even in the best of economic circumstances, keeping existing customers is more cost efficient than attracting new ones. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review quantifies this fact, concluding that “loyalty leaders” manage to grow their revenue at 2.5x the rate of industry competitors. This is even more true during a recession, which is why it’s so important to make sure that you’re utilizing your existing customer data as effectively as possible.

3. Digital Transformation Is No Longer Optional

Businesses across the country have suddenly found themselves faced with an enormous challenge: getting their employees set up to work remotely. For organizations without a robust digital strategy, this has been a difficult feat to accomplish.

The takeaway here is clear: if your business isn’t fully digitized, there’s never been a better time to undergo a full digital transformation. And if your organization is struggling, don’t despair. There’s still time to build a solution that enables your employees to work remotely.

The bottom line: In the face of COVID-19, businesses need remote access to customer data. Even after the current crisis subsides, this need will only continue to grow. A cloud-based CRM solution is the answer.

Next Steps for Your CRM Software Project

Does your organization need to expand an existing CRM system? Are you considering transitioning to a new platform, or are you just getting started on your CRM journey? Whatever the case may be, now is an excellent time to get started with a new CRM software project.

ABOUT AKA ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONSAKA specializes in making it easier to do business, simplifying processes and reducing risks. With agility, expertise, and original industry solutions, we embrace projects other technology firms avoid—regardless of their complexity. As a true strategic partner, we help organizations slay the dragons that are keeping them from innovating their way to greatness. Call us at 212-502-3900!

Article by: Matthew Case | 212-502-3900

Matthew Case has worked with CRM for 9 years and with Microsoft Dynamics since CRM 2011. Specializing in CRM architecture, interface design, user adoption, and change management, he is driven by the desire to help users find ways to easier, more efficient work through software innovation.

Connecting Software is proud to have been selected as “Top 10 Blockchain Solution Provider” by Enterprise Security Magazine.

The award follows the launch in the last quarter of the company’s Blockchain-based digital seal solutions.

The award-winning digital seal solutions

Both CB Digital Seal for SharePoint and CB Digital Seal allow you to seal your documents digitally. These solutions use Blockchain technology to seal the documents. The distributed ledger technology guarantees all sealed files are tamperproof.

The key idea is that you and other stakeholders can trust the data you have. After all, you know there is no way someone could have made any changes after the timestamped digital seal.

Having trustworthy documents and files helps companies be ready for their internal or external audits and accelerates business data compliance in a fast and cost-effective way.

CB Digital Seal for SharePoint is specific to Microsoft SharePoint, while the more generic CB Digital Seal with Blockchain Technology that can integrate with Microsoft Dynamics, other CRM solutions, or even other types of software.

About the award, Thomas Berndorfer, Connecting Software’s CEO, says “Receiving such an award is very encouraging. I am very proud of our team for making this come true!“.

Connecting Software is a 15-year-old company. It produces software for synchronization, migration and integration. Currently with 40 employees, Connecting Software is a truly global company. It spreads through 4 different countries: United States, Austria, Slovakia and Portugal.

How easy it is to create good quality, relevant, and engaging content just-in-time? Quick answer – it’s not necessarily a piece of cake, but if you put the right ingredients together and follow a proven recipe, it can turn out to be a tasty, beautifully layered tiramisu.

The ever-changing landscape of the IT world and its digital assets does not provide a lot of time for content creators to ponder what should be produced and how to really address audiences’ needs. New products, disruptive technologies, and cloud releases knock on your door every minute, awaiting corresponding enablement content.

How can we achieve all of it in an environment that, by default, is unstable, unpredictable, and unbelievably fast-paced? Wouldn’t it also be great to cut out some time for innovating, experimenting, and testing new enablement platforms, instructional design techniques, and more?

In this series of articles, we share some ingredients of our recipe for success. Modus operandi to stay in the game of supporting software adoption. Our story stretches between years spent in small content development teams, working mostly on big classroom training and e-learning courses, then growing considerably, and introducing new learning platforms that adapt to the need of bite-size, micro-learning while becoming a part of a huge organization with procedures and constraints.

Whether you’re working in a startup, middle-size company, or a corporate setting, we believe you’ll be able to find useful tips that will match your context.

Agile mindset at the core – What’s in it for me?

Confession: We did not reinvent the wheel. We tried out the same strategies and tactics that were already successful with our organization. We decided to follow an agile mindset as the core principle for whatever we do within our ranks: all levels of decision-making, project management, team setup, prototyping, and more. So far, we have good results, and yes, we can attest – agile works not only for developing software.

Our product development and customer success departments are agile at heart, and we share the same language, vocabulary, and guiding principles. That translates into improved expectation management, understanding stakeholders’ feedback, and our more organized response to the growing pipeline of incoming requests for enablement. It provides us with greater confidence in estimating what we can produce, by when, and in what format.

Shifts in the company’s and products’ strategies also present less of a hurdle. Adapting to changes and pivoting became less frustrating once we had a well-organized framework allowing us to rethink the most important piece of work to deliver, recalculate the resources and timelines, and leave us with a “we got it” feeling at the end of the day.

If you struggle with the increasing number of time-sensitive requests for content, communicating with an intricate net of stakeholders across your organization, losing sight of where the priorities are, or needing to scale-up quickly, consider agile and its frameworks for your organization and team. It can be scrum, kanban, agile project management (based on DSDM), lean, or a combination of them. Give it time, be aware of the learning curve, and, as you become more comfortable with the approach, adapt it for your context and create your own recipe.

To give you some inspiration, let me share a story of what helped us in our transition to agile content development.

A content operations governance model that works

Some of you might already be familiar with the content operations concept as the glue connecting different efforts and allowing everyone to consistently execute their content strategy. Content operations covers many areas: guidelines and processes for content development and publishing, sets of clear roles, quality standards, data and analytics, and more. Its structure can be applied in various domains: content marketing, enablement content, etc.

For us, the agile spice is pronounced most visibly in our guidelines and processes for planning, content production, publishing frameworks, and team setup, so let’s focus on them as our governance model first.

Here are the three most important ingredients of our recipe that have proven to work repeatedly within the last couple of years.

1. Backlog prioritization process

The tiramisu’s ladyfingers layer providing steady, yet flexible construction for choosing priorities; it turns a simple, unorganized mousse into a spongy cake. It also provides a few important things for high-level decisions:

Transparent place, the backlog for all incoming requests: We use this to capture the overall demand and put it in order of importance. This also translates into immediate communication to our stakeholders on what’s currently being produced, plans for the upcoming months, and the requests that were deprioritized or postponed.

Set of prioritization criteria: This brings fast decision-making to our high-level planning; a formula that can be used whenever we need to decide what to focus on first. As a team, you need to come up with a clear matrix of all factors that guide you on how to treat incoming requests. Read Jacek Konopelski’s post for further information.

A quick way to estimate needed effort: Perform a feasibility check for potential projects, understanding that most of the time we work with limited resources and need to choose the next piece of work wisely.

All of this enables us to adapt to strategy shifts and choose the optimal content type (in our case, classroom training, e-learning, video, tutorial, etc.) considering our audience, time, resources, and sense of priority.

In the end, we have a good understanding of what and why we should produce next.

2. Agile project management

The mascarpone layer, cementing decisions from high-level planning and translating them into the project’s setup. It makes everything smooth and seamless, is lightweight, but not just fluff. Agile project management, based on DSDM, gives a framework tailored specifically for the project world, combining best practices from the product, software development, and business project-implementation scenarios: What foundations we should set, how many production sprints we need, what to focus on first to finish our work in time. With a clear project setup answering those questions, we can dive deeper into what should happen when and on a high-level, how it should happen.

Here are a couple of useful things we stole from this framework:

What’s fixed, what’s not, and the MVP mindset: We learned to distinguish between what is set in stone in a project and what we are comfortable negotiating or letting go. The agreed quality level and timelines (based on estimation and type of content) became fixed values that we don’t like to compromise. We could do a lot with the scope of content though deciding how much we’d like to put into the course agenda, how many videos into a video series, etc. The minimum viable product (MVP), minimum usable subset, or simply our core must-haves taught us to focus on the crucial parts of the scope – what the content asset cannot be released without. We had to tame our inner perfectionist (not easy!) and learn to address nice-to-have items (not essential or high value-generating tasks) only if there is enough time after the MVP is completed. Quicker go-to-market allows us to test new ideas and obtain feedback early on, without spending time polishing content nobody is waiting on.

Prototyping: This became easier as well. One example is our microlearning platform. From both the platform and content-creation perspectives, we started the project with a clear MVP in mind. We delivered enough functionalities and content to seize interest and test whether what we proposed brings value. Once successful, we ramped up our platform and content development based on the reception from the audience.

3. Scrum framework for the production process and roles setup

Proven and established in the industry, the scrum framework has been around for quite a while now and brought us a fresh perspective into organizing ourselves on the team level. It was the final, strong jolt of caffeine, the best coffee for keeping our team energized and focused. It instilled in us a habit of inspecting and adapting that affected the way we make day-to-day decisions on how to develop our content in changing circumstances.

A few things we borrowed and continue to use:

Set of roles: This streamlined our efforts, introducing division of focus and labor, e.g., with nominating product owners deciding what should go into each product enablement portfolio, and scrum masters facilitating daily operations and keeping the team’s attention on priorities. All of this fits nicely into our educational landscape and bridges gaps between the portfolio manager, course architect, and other existing roles. Read Angelina Padarnitsas’ post for further information.

Building content incrementally: Brick by brick, we plan our actions in a structured way for a two-week time container – a sprint. The regularity of specific activities within that time (sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, etc.) sets a good production rhythm and teaches transparency. All of this helps us retain a high focus on the most important tasks in front of us while feeling safe about completing the big picture, one sprint at a time.

Learning and taking calculated risks: At the end of each sprint, the project team gets together to review the results of the work. It’s time to hit the pause button and reflect on how the team came together to see what worked or didn’t work for them in the last two weeks and what they’d like to improve. Based on the lessons learned, they could determine what elements to add or remove from the sprint’s scope. Such a decision could be made on the go, without managerial approvals, which in turn increases accountability and ownership over the project deliverables.

Pick me up, cheer me up

The backlog prioritization process, agile project management, scrum team, and production setup are the agile ingredients of our not-so-secret recipe for success. It allows us to create clear and lean formulas for gathering and prioritizing our content demand, plan out projects focused on value-generating tasks, and organize ourselves without stress within production sprints. It gives us a solid foundation for undertaking new projects and prototyping. It encourages us daily to improve ourselves and stay on the lookout for new production technologies, instructional design methods, techniques, and innovation processes. The learning never ends, including in education and enablement departments.

Tiramisu is translated from Italian to English as “pick me up” or “cheer me up,” so feel free to pick up and help yourself to whatever you find useful from our experiences and create your own mouthwatering dish. Buon appetito!

Learn more about the recipe for crafting the new workforce experience. Watch the on-demand webcast.

Cloud software, by its nature, is released through continuous deployment, a regular release cycle that keeps customers happy but sets a difficult pace for the production of enabling materials. Learning departments must develop a rapid decision-making process to keep up with software changes, accommodate to market trends, and adapt to organizational changes.

With a agile content development (ACD) framework, companies can prioritize the content backlog to make transparent quality decisions on education content production in a large enterprise.

The challenge

Running an education team in a large enterprise in the IT industry means your educational materials – videos, tutorials, classroom, or virtual training – must form a cohesive portfolio. You must release them in sync with the software, tailored to the right audience and their needs. Your product is running on a continuous release cycle, and you have resource constraints and limited information about your audience. Being part of a big enterprise also means engaging with many stakeholders: product teams, customer- and partner-success organizations, services, etc., who will come to you with their audience’s needs, ideas, and opinions, all to influence your decisions on what assets your department should produce next. You must also adapt effectively to trends in e-learning and your industry as well as changes in your organization.

So, with so many moving parts, how do you decide which educational asset to produce now? By introducing the content backlog and the prioritization process around it.

To understand it, you need to know a bit about the ACD first.

Agile content development

If your software teams follow an agile development methodology, so should the adjacent departments, like learning. That’s what we did when we created the ACD framework. We borrowed concepts from the agile project management framework (see DSDM) and the scrum agile methodology and adapted them to fit the development of educational material in a large enterprise. Sandra Policht’s post explains more about the ACD.

In agile software development, the product backlog is essentially a prioritized list of product features. This list is dynamic, and each entry (feature) has an estimated effort and measurable value to the customer.

In ACD, the content backlog is a prioritized list of all requests for content. It’s a living document, transparent to all internal stakeholders. Each content request is scoped to determine the estimated effort, and like its software development counterpart, it has measurable value to the customer.

Maintaining the requests on the content backlog is the responsibility of a product owner (PO). In the ACD world, this is a person with an understanding of customers’ needs and what’s essential for them. The PO owns the corresponding education portfolio and has a high-level understanding of product capabilities. Their key responsibility is to continuously and proactively seek feedback from various sources and turn them into requests on the content backlog. The sources usually are customers, product management, trainers, customer/partner success organizations and consultants, feedback from the company’s learning platforms, surveys, etc.

In a software enterprise with a vast software portfolio, a team of POs (with each PO having a distinct area of responsibility) is accompanied by a portfolio manager (PM) who owns the execution of the content backlog prioritization process; and by a project coordinator (PC) who owns production estimates and governs the team of scrum masters (SM) to ensure the expected workload doesn’t the exceed team’s capacity.

To understand the scope of all involved roles and their responsibilities in ACD, refer to Angelina Padarnitsas’ post. Keep in mind these roles diverge from their DSDM and scrum prototypes, and we invented a few new roles.

Prioritizing the content backlog

The content backlog prioritization process is a methodical approach to cope with the competing requests and many different factors/criteria to consider. The process consists of the following four steps, which each PO executes to arrive at the optimal decision for the next production cycle.

Step 1: Measuring against key criteria

For each request on the backlog, the PO goes through the following list of criteria (this is not an exhaustive list but a solid start) and gives it a score (e.g., 0-10). The higher the total score on a request, the more important it is to address it in the next production cycle.

Business and product strategy: These are the most important criteria to consider. The PO and the education material must follow it. What are the company’s focus areas? Is there a key customer segment, region, or audience? What’s coming in the next product release? What is the company’s flagship product? Is there a part of the product that should be emphasized? For example, the education department may have to support building a software-developer community and therefore would focus production on content for a technical audience and their preferred asset types. POs should prioritize accordingly and give high scores to the content requests that are in line with company strategies, and give low (i.e., 0) scores to all other requests.

Audience size: While addressing all relevant audience types is important, POs must prioritize proportionally to audience size and importance. For example, POs in a company selling a software framework may prioritize coding tutorials for partners’ developers over end-user guides for business users. Requests addressing the major audience get a high score and those for niche audiences get low scores.

Portfolio gap: Is each learning path fully covered with content? If an asset is missing in a learning path, especially at the beginning, and for the key audience, POs must prioritize accordingly (i.e., give a high score).

Release stretch: If an asset (e.g., a video) is relevant for the audience but becomes outdated and far behind the current software version, the PO should give a high score to the corresponding request, low in other cases.

Feedback: Consider external and internal feedback about content quality and topic accuracy: if it is negative and the topic is in demand, the PO should give the request a very high score.

Timing: Are there upcoming events, hack-a-thons, marketing campaigns, or other promotional opportunities? The PO will give higher scores to those highly exposed topics and assets.

Product road map: By staying close to product teams, the PO can identify which elements from the product roadmap may change (be postponed or dropped) and prioritize content requests accordingly: stable topics get a higher score; volatile topics a lower score.

Product adoption and revenue: Is a product or module in high demand by customers? Content for a frequently used or sold product takes priority over others (i.e., gets a higher score).

At this stage, each PO has a prioritized list with high-score requests on top. What remains is to estimate the production effort and analyze the scope of the top requests.

Adding estimates: Maintaining the data for past projects is the best effort predictor of future projects – see the roles of the project coordinator and scrum master. The PO consults with the content architect (CA) who has detailed technical product knowledge to ensure the estimates’ accuracy.

Analyzing the scope: While detailed scope definition of each request is part of the content production (which happens after Step 4), at this stage the PO determines the “must-have” and the “won’t have” from the customers’ point of view (see the MoSCoW method). This approach enables the PO to consider alternative types of assets for the required work. The PO finds smarter alternatives to fulfill (at least partially) more resource-demanding requests, e.g., a video series instead of an extra day of training, or covering a “should have” topic with a trainer demo instead of an exercise for students (a lower system cost). In the end, each request’s scope is reduced to the minimal viable product, but not less. Because POs own the corresponding education portfolio, they keep it clean of duplicates and outdated material. For example, they have the discretion to address a request for new developer training by changing the content of existing assets in the developer learning path. They find smarter alternatives to fulfill the more resource-demanding requests.

Step 3: Deciding

At this stage, POs have all the necessary data at hand to make a quality decision on what to produce next. Thanks to the criteria scoring, they know the importance of the requests and the necessary scope of each (“must” vs. “won’t”). Thanks to the PCs, they know team capacity and how many of the high-score requests their team can address. Thanks to the CAs, they understand the technical complexity, such as introducing demos or exercises (if there are any). POs start to see alternatives and focus on what’s essential. They can, with confidence, decide to reduce an asset’s scope without compromising the quality and still effectively increase learner engagement with the content. In the end, the PO has the content production road map ready.

Step 4: Communicating

The PM and the PO communicate with stakeholders, presenting the portfolio production roadmap for the next production cycle, the decisions behind it, and the team’s capacity to produce the content. Presenting all gathered requests, considered criteria, and explaining the decision-making process prevents disappointment from the more vocal stakeholders. Opportunities for synergy also emerge here, as other teams decide to reuse assets and volunteer to co-produce assets together. After this step, the team starts the next content production cycle; but that’s material for another article.

Summary

ACD has served us well for the past several years, and it’s evolved along with our team to meet our growing set of products, audiences, channels, and organizational complexity. What once was done by a single person now is split into several roles.

Whatever the size of your organization, you will need a repeatable method to make quality decisions on content production. The next time you are under pressure from time and stakeholders, apply this prioritization process or even consider fully implementing the ACD.

The demands of the Office of the CFO are exponentially increasing. Since the turn of the century, it hasn’t been enough to close the book and produce financials. The Office of the CFO is expected to partner with the leaders in the organization – e.g. Sales, Marketing, Product – to enable them to make timelier and well-informed business decisions. The needs of Sales can be quite distinct when compared the needs of an IT department; thus, company-wide partnership can require extensive effort and attention.

Automation is imperative in order to provide the expected level of service / partnership from Accounting. High performing teams are constantly assessing activities that should be automated or eliminated, in order to spend time on more value-added activities.

In this release, we are enabling Accounting teams to be more efficient through automation. With a long list of new and enhanced features, NetSuite provides software companies with expanded capabilities for supporting subscription revenue recognition, monitoring project health and streamlining processes, such as bank reconciliations:

On the global financial front, the combination of seamless banking integration via the Bank Feeds SuiteApp and a new banking plug-in featuring open banking APIs enables automated import of banking data into NetSuite from financial institutions around the world and delivers increased financial insight.

Enhancements to NetSuite bring greater visibility into contract revenue, improving insight into revenue allocation and increasing understanding of whether offerings have been fully billed or not.

Firms with global billing operations and multi-subsidiary customers will enjoy streamlined billing with a single customer record and a clearer view of customer relationships.

Better revenue trace-through and an enhanced audit trail means improved visibility into how changes to subscriptions impact revenue streams, as well as more precise revenue recognition.

Changes to subscriptions can now be managed in bulk, saving time and improving invoice accuracy. Usage activities that shouldn’t be invoiced can now be removed easily, and the ability to update subscriptions results in more accurate and complete invoices.

An improved set of tools and smarter analytics simplifies management of project budgets. Organizations can now easily see how costs are impacted when adding and editing activities. Automated cost calculations help to increase accuracy, and miscoded time or expenses can now be quickly identified. What’s more, NetSuite now offers system suggestions for updating time estimates when unexpected costs arise.

New time modification enhancements provide better control of billable time. Time entries can now be easily modified, and an audit trail makes it possible to correct entries entered against the wrong project. Plus, NetSuite Analytics now supports time modification requests and entries, improving visibility into changes.

Enhancements bring automation and flexibility to measuring the health of projects. Automated calculation of key financial data raises the accuracy of project, budget and work breakdown structure records. In NetSuite project profitability reports, tracked and actual time are better categorized as either actual or committed costs, and forecast and actual charges are now easily included.

Learn More About NetSuite 2020 Release 1

These are just the highlights; there’s much more for software companies in NetSuite 2020 Release 1 than can be covered in a single blog post. For more specifics on the complete list of new features, be sure to read the Release Notes.

Finally, be sure to request access to your Release Preview account. There, you can test to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2020 Release 1.

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(Reuters) — The Trump administration took measures on Friday to crimp exports of artificial intelligence software as part of a bid to keep sensitive technologies out of the hands of rival powerslike China. Under a new rule which goes into effect on Monday, companies that export certain types of geospatial imagery software from the United States must apply for a license to send it overseas except when it is being shipped to Canada.

“They want to keep American companies from helping the Chinese make better AI products that can help their military,” said James Lewis, a technology expert with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. The rule will likely be welcomed by industry, Lewis said, because it had feared a much broader crackdown on exports of most artificial intelligence hardware and software

The measure covers software that could be used by sensors, drones, and satellites to automate the process of identifying targets for both military and civilian ends, Lewis said, noting it was a boon for industry, which feared a much broader crackdown on exports of AI hardware and software.

The rule will go into effect in the United States alone, but U.S. authorities could later submit it to international bodies to try to create a level playing field globally. It comes amid growing frustration from Republican and Democratic lawmakers over the slow roll-out of rules toughening up export controls, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, urging the Commerce Department to speed up the process.

“While the government believes that it is in the national security interests of the United States to immediately implement these controls, it also wants to provide the interested public with an opportunity to comment on the control of new items,” the rule release said.